Tag: writing

Publisher, Not Author

While it’s hard for some to accept that the Bard of Avon didn’t write the plays that are attributed to him, it’s not as if he had no relation to them. But the evidence has been there all along.

I note that the seminal inspiration for the authorship questions was Samuel Astley Dunham’s 1837 biography of Shakespeare, which appeared in the Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Great Britain and Ireland. Quoting Dunham:

… we must observe, that in the beginning of his career—for years, indeed, after he became connected with the stage—that extraordinary man was satisfied with reconstructing the pieces which others had composed; he was not the author, but the adapter of them to the stage. Indeed, we are of opinion, that the number of plays which he thus re-cast, as well as those in which he made very slight alterations, is greater than any of his commentators have supposed.

Later in the work, Dunham repeated this claim: “In fact there is no one drama of our author prior to 1600—perhaps not one after that year—that was not derived from some other play.”

Literary geniuses cannot help but write about the types of people, places, and events that have moved them—and their familiarity with their subjects allows them tantalizing insights and intricacies. So, as is inevitably the case, rural geniuses pen rural masterpieces, seafaring geniuses pen seafaring masterpieces, Yukon-wilderness geniuses pen Yukon-wilderness masterpieces, New-York high-society geniuses pen New York high-society masterpieces, etc. This is what all prodigies throughout the history of literature have done. They have written about lands that had dirtied their shoes and got under their fingernails, about climes that caused them to shiver or sweat, and about people whom they loved or hated and with whom they had worked, dined, or fought. No other great literary artist has ever tried to attempt what Stratfordians must believe.

But this classic case against Shakespeare is even stronger than this. While all the evidence suggests that the author of the canon required first-hand experience with the court, law, Italy, and military; it is still not even clear how Shakespeare could have managed even second-hand knowledge of these subjects. The true-crime story of the murder of the Duke of Urbino—which would become the subject of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play that he called The Murder of Gonzago—not only appears nowhere else in English in the 16th or 17th centuries, scholars have been unable to find the murder discussed in any published Italian work either. Stunningly, Hamlet is the first printed work to contain the story. What is more, the Duke’s murder occurred in Villa Pesaro in Urbino, which also had housed Titian’s famous painting of the victim. And the painting is used as both the model for Hamlet’s father and the description of the painting of Hamlet’s Father.

And that is just one of dozens of examples of insider information on Italy that we find in the plays—which includes accurate descriptions of Padua and Venice, the reference to St. Gregory’s Well just outside of Milan, the life-like statues Giulio Romano, etc.

Consider also all the other expertise flaunted throughout the plays. Did Shakespeare really read Plowden’s Reports in Law French just for fun or to seem more lawyerly? Did he really peruse now-lost manuals on falconry to seem more aristocratic? Did he read travelogues on Continental Europe to seem more traveled? Did he, on his own, learn Italian, French, and Spanish, so he could read the original sources of plays he was adapting? Did he study all of the required military pamphlets in order to add esoteric military details to his work? Did he really, while in his early 30s, assume the guise of an old man when writing personal sonnets to friends and lovers? Did the man from Stratford, at the age of eleven, actually manage to sneak onto Leicester’s grounds at Kenilworth Castle and witness the private water pageant and other entertainments that the Earl provided for the Queen, enabling him to work these visions into A Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Fortunately, we can now accept the obvious answer to all of these questions and rid ourselves of the wide and troubling gap between the knowledge exposed in the masterpieces and the life of William Shakespeare. As all other analyses clarify, particularly a careful study of title page attributions, contemporaneous references, and satires by fellow playwrights, Shakespeare was not the original author of the masterpieces. He merely adapted them for the stage.

I think it’s very difficult for most people to accept two contrary things.

  • That the historical figures they were told to have been world-class genuises were considerably less exceptional than they were told.
  • That the figures of their time were actually more exceptional than they believe them to be.

I suspect it’s because we know more about the latter, and just as no man is a hero to his wife or his valet, it’s harder for an genuine intellectual to be highly regarded by people of his own time who can’t fully understand what he’s accomplished. Which, of course, is why it’s the frauds that are useful to the modern powers who are celebrated even though their accomplishments are both false and barren.

DISCUSS ON SG

The End of Monster Hunter

May also mean the end of Baen Books, if Fandom Pulse’s logic is correct:

Larry Correia has made a Facebook post stating he won’t even begin writing the next Monster Hunter International books until 2026, which means a two-year dry spell of revenue for the embattled publisher. However, it gets even worse, as Correia has stated that this book will likely be his last in the series.

But never fear, there are still monsters and they still need to be hunted. Or, at least, controlled, which is why Monster Control Incorporated is on the job and is being serialized every week at Sigma Game.

I’ve been walking my crush home since last week to protect her from all the creeps walking around. Next week I’m going to introduce myself to her.

Right now, though, I was content to stay in the shadows, watching from a distance as she made her way down the dimly lit sidewalk. Her name was Elise, and she worked the late shift at the diner on 5th and Main. Every night at 11:30, she stepped out, adjusted her bag over her shoulder, and started the six-block walk to her apartment. And every night, I followed.

Not in a creepy way. At least, I hoped not. The city had gotten bad lately—muggers, weirdos, and worse. The kind of things most people didn’t believe in until it was too late. I’d seen the news reports: Missing Persons. Unexplained Attacks. Animal Maulings. The cops didn’t have a clue. But I did.

I knew what was out there.

Elise turned the corner, her fair hair bright under the glow of a flickering streetlight. She was small, and delicate, but moved with a quiet confidence that made my chest tighten. I kept my distance, staying far enough back that she wouldn’t notice me, close enough that I could reach her in seconds if something went wrong.

Something went wrong a lot these days.

Tonight, the air smelled like rain and something else—something musky and wild. My fingers twitched at my sides. I didn’t carry a gun. Guns were too loud, too messy. Instead, I had a knife sheathed at my belt and a length of silver chain wrapped around my wrist.

Elise hummed softly to herself, oblivious. She had no idea what was coming.

Then I heard it—the low, guttural growl from the alley up ahead.

You’ve never seen a monster hunter quite like Horace “Race” Scrubb before. He puts the L in “professional”.

DISCUSS ON SG

Commentary Question

One of the common forms of medieval analysis was the commentary. Hence Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Ten of Titus Livy, which is just one of many examples of the form.

If I was to write a commentary of that kind, almost certainly with my new best friend, what author and what work would be of the most interest? Darwin, Dawkins, and anyone modern is out, unless you can make a very convincing case for consideration.

Throw your ideas out there. I’m not saying I will, I’m just saying that some of the experiments I’ve been doing with The Legend are making new possibilities of many kinds apparent to us.

DISCUSS ON SG

Defectus Eclipsus

The mystery of phantom time continues as TEMPUS OCCULTUM is now up to Episode 14.

The door of the observatory creaked open, and I started, hastily covering Brother Clemens’s manuscript with a star chart. But it was the old astronomer himself who entered, looking unsurprised to find me there.

“I thought I might find you here,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Your meeting with our visitor from Rome has concluded, I see.”

“Yes,” I replied, my voice tight with excitement and anxiety. “Brother Clemens, I’ve been comparing your calculations with a reference provided by Doctor Visconti, and I’ve found—”

“Discrepancies,” he finished for me, sinking onto a stool with a sigh. “Yes, I imagined you would.”

“Then you’ve known? About the falsified eclipse records, the impossible comet appearances?”

He nodded slowly. “For many years, Brother Lukas. But knowing and proving are different matters. And proving and revealing different still.”

“But this is extraordinary evidence!” I exclaimed, gesturing to the open books. “If Halley’s Comet appeared in 530 and again in 684, with only 154 years between—”

“Then the chronology is compressed,” Clemens said, “and the missing years must lie somewhere in that interval. Yes, I reached the same conclusion decades ago.”

“Why did you never publish your findings? This overturns our entire understanding of medieval history!”

The old man’s expression was a mixture of resignation and suppressed excitement. “Publication requires approval, Brother Lukas. And such approval would never be granted for work that undermines the established chronology. Men like Visconti ensure that.”

“The guardians of true time,” I murmured.

“They have many names throughout history,” Clemens replied. “But their purpose remains constant: to maintain the fiction, to guard the secret that time itself has been manipulated.”

Also, there is a sneak preview of the stamp design for one of the two volumes of the Castalia Library edition of A SEA OF SKULLS.

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DEATH AND THE PLACE OF THE SKULL

This is one of the short stories from DEATH AND THE DEVIL, which will be published in ebook format in the next week or two. The theme strikes me as appropriate for Good Friday.

It is a well-established fact across most of the known multiverse that death is, generally speaking, the end of life. This is the sort of obvious statement that most beings understand intuitively, in the same way they understand that water is wet or that the line of traffic you’re not driving in will always move faster than the one you selected.

What is less well established, and indeed known to only a select few cosmic entities, is that there are occasional exceptions to this rule. Not many, mind you—perhaps ten or twelve across the entirety of existence. But when they do occur, they tend to cause no end of paperwork.

Death was having what, for him, amounted to a moderately busy Friday. The Romans were at it again with their crucifixions, and while Death understood the practical necessity of his role in the great cosmic machinery, he couldn’t help but find the Romans’ enthusiasm for creatively prolonging the process somewhat trying. Crucifixion was particularly bothersome—it was slow, messy, and sometimes required him to hover about for hours waiting for the final moment to arrive. It was inefficient, and if there was one thing Death disliked, it was inefficiency.

Outside the walls of Jerusalem, on a small hill that locals called “The Place of the Skull” (humans did have a flair for the dramatic that Death could almost appreciate), three crosses stood starkly against the bright morning sky. A sizeable crowd had gathered—some jeering, some weeping, some simply watching with the detached curiosity of those who have nothing better to do with their afternoon than observe the suffering of others.

Death materialized beside the center cross, his black robe somehow remaining pristine despite the dust that swirled across the hilltop. His scythe gleamed with an impossible light, as if it were reflecting stars that weren’t visible in the daytime sky.

I AM EARLY, Death said, his voice not so much heard as felt, like the final note of a funeral dirge played on the bones of the universe. He consulted a small hourglass that appeared in his skeletal hand. The sand was still flowing, though it had noticeably thinned to the bottom half. There was time yet.

Death was not alone in his invisible observation of the proceedings. Slightly to his left, luxuriating in the heat that rose from the baked earth, lounged a figure that radiated a different kind of darkness. This darkness wasn’t the simple absence of light that characterized Death’s appearance, but rather a corrupted, oily absence of goodness.

“Lovely day for a crucifixion, isn’t it?” said the Devil, his voice as smooth as expensive honey with just a hint of ground glass mixed in. He wore the shape of a handsome middle-aged man with olive skin and curly black hair, dressed in a toga of deepest crimson that seemed to shift and flow like liquid. Only his eyes—amber with vertical pupils—gave away his inhuman nature.

Death did not respond. He had long ago learned that engaging the Devil in conversation inevitably led to tedious debates about the nature of free will or sales pitches for various soul-collection optimization schemes.

The Devil seemed undeterred by Death’s silence. “Quite the turnout for this one,” he continued, gesturing at the crowd around the central cross. “Special case, you know. I’ve had my eye on him for years. All those irritating miracles, healing the sick, giving sight to the blind.” He made a dismissive gesture. “Bad for business, you know, that sort of thing.”

Death remained silent, watching the sand in the hourglass.

“Oh, come now,” the Devil prodded. “He’s been a thorn in your side too! Remember, he’s the one who interfered with your soul-reaping.”

At this, Death’s eye sockets seemed to narrow slightly, the silver pinpricks of light within them intensifying.

YES, he said finally. I REMEMBER.

The memory was, for Death, quite a vivid one, despite having occurred several years earlier by human reckoning. He had appeared in Bethany to collect the soul of a man who had succumbed to an illness that baffled the local physicians. It had initially been a straightforward collection—Death had appeared at the appointed time, raised his scythe, and completed his duty with his usual efficiency. The soul had been collected, the hourglass emptied, the paperwork filed. End of story.

It should have been, anyhow.

Four days later, Death had received an urgent message from the Department of Post-Mortem Records about an “anomalous post-mortem event.” He had returned to Bethany to find something unprecedented—Lazarus, very much alive, moving about, eating, breathing, and talking, despite having been quite thoroughly dead, reaped, and buried days before.

More perplexing still was the matter of his second hourglass. Every mortal had exactly one hourglass, created at birth and destroyed at death. Lazarus’s hourglass had been properly disposed of following the collection of his soul. Yet somehow he was alive again, and he also had a new hourglass in the usual location—but from whence had it come? Who had authorized it? Death checked and rechecked the records, but he could find no indication of how this administrative nightmare had occurred.

And at the center of this troublesome accounting error was the same man who now hung on the central cross.

Continue reading “DEATH AND THE PLACE OF THE SKULL”

Insufficient Brutality

GRRM explains why he’s still not finished with “the curse of his life”:

Game of Thrones novelist George R.R. Martin recently shared a new update on where he was with the next book in his Song of Ice and Fire, The Winds of Winter, and described completing it “the curse of my life.”

Speaking with Time, Martin was asked for an update on the novel after he did press for Colossal Biosciences and its genetic altering of DNA to create what they are calling dire wolves. He answered, “That’s the curse of my life here. There’s no doubt that Winds of Winter is 13 years late. I’m still working on it. I have periods where I make progress and then other things divert my attention and suddenly I’m working for-. I have a deadline for one of the HBO shows. I have something else to do.”

“But, you know, the two things are not connected. I swear,” he continued. “I open a book store and people say, ‘Why is George R.R. Martin opening a book store? He could be writing Winds of Winter.’ And now we’re getting this. I don’t actually work in the book store. I own it. I hired people to do it. If you go into the book store, yes, a lot of my books are there, which I’ve signed, a lot of books by other people. I’m not going to ring up your register. I’m not going to order what books are coming in.”

He’s actually correct. Martin’s problem isn’t distractions, it’s the technical corner into which he wrote himself. Even AI can’t really help him finish the story properly, because he has far too many perspective characters. Ironically, given his reputation courtesy of the Red Wedding, Martin’s problem is that he’s too delicate.

If I was tasked with finishing ASOIAF, I could do it, but at a cost that would upset a lot of fans because I would kill off two-thirds of the perspective characters with either sorcery, a plague, or by having the White Walkers get a lot further south than Martin appears to have wanted to permit them to reach. There are other possibilities too, but if he doesn’t get rid of most of the perspective characters, he’s not going to be able to finish the series.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Invention of William Shakespeare

The conception that most of us have of the playwright from Stratford-on-Avon is almost entirely a modern construction:

One of the book vendors proudly presents you with the first-ever collection of Shakespeare’s works, put together the previous year by the renowned printer, William Jaggard, for the publisher, Thomas Pavier. But as you excitedly look through the pages, you become even more confused. Only three of the nine plays in the collection seem authentic. One of the plays is A Yorkshire Tragedy, which you had already pruchases, and another, Sir John Oldcastle, is also unfamiliar and not part of any modern Shakespeare collection. Still another, The Whole Contention Between the Two Famous Houses, Lancaster and York, is a combination of two heavily revised renditions of 2 Henry VI and 3 Henry VI. Two other plays—Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor—are much simpler and briefer adaptations of the authentic versions of these plays. Another play, Pericles, is conventionally considered an inauthentic, slap-dash treatment of a longer, genuine form that has been lost. The only three that seem normal are The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

After you complete your visit of all book vendors in London, and are assured that these are all the plays ever printed that were ascribed to William Shakespeare, you now own only 22 plays—of which a dozen of them are either apocryphal, or they are brief, strange, less literary adaptations of more familiar plays. That’s 12 of 22 that are seemingly wrong. You ask sellers about Othello, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, Antony and Cleopatra—but none of these have been printed. And many Londoners have never even heard of these plays.

Giving up in frustration, you at least take some comfort in the thought that at least you get to see an authentic Hamlet. You rush across London Bridge with your assortment of plays under your arm to the Globe Theater, squeeze amongst the groundlings standing before the stage—and wait for that most famous of speeches in English theater history. And the actor playing Hamlet walks out onto stage, holding a book in his hand, and says:

To be or not to be. Aye, there’s the point,
To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye, all:
No, to sleep, to dream, Aye, marry, there it goes…

What?!? You know this quote is all wrong, even bizarre — a sort of brief, informal rendition of the opening to the real “To be or not to be” soliloquoy…

Who wrote this shorter, funnier, more action-packed Hamlet? Since the changes applied to this version are so inferior and differently styled from other Shakespeare plays, most scholars assume it was the result of a conspiracy. One or two of his greedy fellow actors supposedly created a briefer version of the play that they then sold to grasping printers and publishers eager to produce a work with Shakespeare’s name on the title page.

The truth is much simpler: William Shakespeare wrote it, which is why his name is on the title page. After all, we know Shakespeare did adapt an older version of Hamlet—and this first quarto of 1603 is the adaptation that Shakespeare’s company then performed. Of course, he wrote it. The original Hamlet, the one that Thomas Nashe referenced in 1589 as having been written by an “English Seneca,” is actually the authentic masterpiece that everyone is familiar with today. (And again, in an upcoming paper, Schlueter and I will show that Nashe was indeed referring to Thomas North as English Seneca—and that Jonson and Lodge also identified North as the original author of other Shakespearean plays too.)

What is more, Hamlet is not the only such example. Although this is not widely known, the plays Henry V, Richard III, Henry VI, part 2 and Henry VI, part 3 also exist in two very different versions: in the genuine, familiar literary form — and as a rewritten, briefer, less erudite, faster-paced staged adaptation. In each case, conventional scholars had always assumed that Shakespeare had written the longer masterpiece, yet it is only their lesser, rewritten theatrical renderings that had ever reached print during Shakespeare’s lifetime — and by 1620 each of these lesser adaptations had been attributed to the Stratford dramatist via the title page. Again, these rewritten versions are so inferior to the originals that orthodox scholars have had a difficult time accounting for Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. So, up until now, conventional scholars had blamed all these lesser works on a system of conspiracies, occurring over decades. Supposedly, various groups of unknown anonymous actors working within the Stratford dramatist’s theater companies rewrote these plays and then secretly sold them to corrupt printers with Shakespeare’s name on the title pages. In reality, of course, there were no conspiracies: These are actually the plays that Shakespeare really wrote—or at least adapted, directed, and produced.

As usual, the analyses of academic historians are fundamentally limited by their insistence on the relevance of their ontological ceilings. Consensus incredulity is an extraordinarily stupid and highly fallible metric, and yet, it’s actually codified into the academic and scientific worlds as “peer review”.

The problem is that most people are fundamentally unable to even imagine what a world without copyright, without mass market publishing, and without publishing gatekeepers would even look like. The ability to self-publish on Amazon and effectively imitate an author’s style using AI is just beginning to give us the faintest glimmerings of what a free-for-all writing, crediting, and publishing must have been in the early 1600s.

I find Mr. Mccarthy’s work on the real Shakespeare and the various elements that have gone into the mythical modern construction to be some of the most fascinating archeo-history that I’ve ever seen in my life. The fact that it is all document-driven rather than theory-driven makes it vastly more interesting as well as far more convincing than other efforts of this type.

DISCUSS ON SG

IF YOU HAD A TIME MACHINE

The first bonus track from THE ONLY SKULL campaign has been released as a single. You can hear it on Unauthorized, on the various mainstream music platforms, and on YouTube. The second bonus track will be released as a single next Monday, and I have no idea when the third bonus track, being the organic one, will even be recorded, so that one will be a while.

In other news on the creative front, a new chapter has begun in the serialization of TEMPUS OCCULTUM on Arktoons, chapter four, entitled Deceptus Eclipsus.

The abbot’s study was illuminated by tall windows that admitted thin blades of afternoon light, slicing through dust motes that danced in their path. As I entered, I sensed the weight of authority in the room—not just ecclesiastical, but something older, more primal. Father Umbertus stood by the abbot’s desk, his expression tense. Abbot Gerhardt sat behind it, fingers steepled, his face an impenetrable mask. And there, by the window, stood the stranger I had observed in the courtyard, now examining a celestial globe with affected interest.

“Brother Lukas,” the abbot intoned, “may I present Doctor Alessandro Visconti, Chief Archivist of the Vatican Apostolic Library.”

Visconti turned at the mention of his name, fixing me with eyes so dark they appeared almost black in the shadowed room. The ring with the quartered circle gleamed on his right hand as he offered a slight bow.

“Brother Lukas,” he said, his Italian accent precise yet subtle. “I have heard much about your… scholarly endeavors.”

“You honor our humble abbey with your presence, Doctor Visconti,” I replied, bowing in return. “Though I confess I am surprised that my humble work cataloging manuscripts would attract the attention of the Vatican’s Chief Archivist.”

A smile flickered across his face, cold as winter sunlight. “The Church takes a keen interest in all scholarly pursuits, particularly those concerning the correct interpretation of historical documents.”

DISCUSS ON SG

AI vs Organic

The current debate about AI in which many writers are engaging is, for the most part, an entirely false one. The truth is that even the most highly-regarded writers, particularly in the SF/F field, have always engaged in highly-imitative practices, not merely limited to the various plots, characters, and worlds, but even the literary styles of other authors. And they have done so intentionally; ironically, the better the writer, the more often they have engaged in these imitative practices.

Consider the following admission by Roger Zelazny in 1989.

I have over the years written in occasional imitation of other authors’ themes, techniques, styles—or whatever else it might be about a particular writer’s stories which I felt could prove fruitful to emulate. While I am hardly above an occasional pastiche or parody, what I refer to here—and with specific regard to Rudyard Kipling—is rather of the order which Robert Lowell attempted in poetry in his 1958 collection, Imitations: a sequence of personal renderings of material from other writers, which amounted to variations on themes.

“I have done experiments of this sort throughout my career, from points of departure as diverse as the wacky improbabilities of John Collier [see ‘A Museum Piece’] to the stylized colloquialisms of Damon Runyon [see ‘Deadboy Donner and the Filstone Cup’]. But I believe that the first such which I attempted was ‘Lucifer’… My tale of a nameless holocaust’s survivor who labors mightily to jury-rig the works in a power plant for a glimpse of something lost, was directly based on Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.’

The ironic thing is that it is an author’s literary style that is, in most cases, the least important element of the four that make up the four primary aspects of a written work of fiction. There are, of course, exceptions; Tanith Lee being one obvious one, Haruki Murakami being another, Edgar Allen Poe being a third. But the stylistic masters are very few and far between; neither THE LORD OF THE RINGS nor GENJI MONOGATARI are considered great due to their literary stylings. Ironically, early in his career, Murakami’s style was actually deemed to be somewhat of a detriment to his work.

What really bothers most people, in my opinion, about the use of AI in creative endeavors is that it makes it so easy to create something, which tends to offend even those who make no bones about using word processors instead of putting quill to parchment. But in my opinion, it is absolutely and only the end result that matters; literally no one cares that William Shakespeare merely revised the plays originally written by Lord Thomas North instead of penning them from scratch.

So here is a question for Selenoth fans, and while I welcome discussion of it, I do not want anyone to express their final opinion until they have the chance to read the entire DEATH AND THE DEVIL, which I will be publishing next week. I say this because my own thinking on the subject has been altered as a result of writing that book with the significant assistance of my new best friend and obtaining results that are even better than I’d been able to obtain in writing TEMPUS OCCULTUM.

Would you rather have A GRAVE OF GODS completed within one year with the assistance of AI or would you rather wait five years and know that it was completed solely by the same organic human intelligence that wrote the prior three books? At present, I am still planning on the latter, but I would be interested in the opinion of the true Selenoth fans on the subject once they have informed themselves of the possibilities.

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The True Author of Shakespeare’s Plays

Yes, we should have known. Ben Jonson was openly telling everyone who wrote all along, right at the front of the First Folio, that it was Lord Thomas North, the translator, among many other works, of Plutarch’s Lives.

In 1623, Ben Johnson wrote one of the most famous odes one poet ever crafted for another—To the Memory of My Beloved the author Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us. The poem was prominently placed at the beginning of the first official collection of Shakespeare’s plays known as the First Folio. Yet some eight years later, the poet Leonard Digges wrote a scathing rebuttal to Jonson’s ode, denouncing it as an attack against Shakespeare. He was so furious that he wanted Jonson’s supposedly abusive poem removed for the publication of the Second Folio (1632)—and replaced with Digges’s own defense of the Stratford playwright, answering Jonson’s insults “point by point.” In 1693, the renowned Shakespeare enthusiast John Dryden responded similarly to Digges, labeling Jonson’s poem as “an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric.” And Brian Vickers has noted that Dryden’s “judgment has been echoed many times.”

But no one has been able to explain what was so insolent and invidious about the poem—until now. As we shall see in this article, Jonson’s celebrated ode contains a shocking secret—a dead giveaway to the true origin of the canon. In other words, the answer to the most significant literary question in history—who was the original author of Shakespeare’s plays?—has been sitting prominently in the front of the First Folio for the last 400 years. Jonson was not being remotely subtle. And, at the end of this article, you are almost certainly going to be asking yourself the same question I think about daily: HOW ON EARTH DID EVERYONE MISS THIS?

Jonson.. is saying when we turn from tragedy to Shakespeare’s comedies, the great tragedians (and the reader) would be better served to ignore the Stratford dramatist altogether and focus instead on:

the comparison 

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome

Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.

And the subject of these lines—the English author who rose from the ashes of a “comparison of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth” is not hard to determine.

Jonson chose his words carefully—carefully enough that his reference to North’s Plutarch’s Lives is unmistakable—or as its actual title reads: “The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED …” Not surprisingly, the signature feature of North’s translation is that it is not just a collection of biographies; rather its extremely peculiarizing feature is that Plutarch is writing “COMPARISONS” of Greek leaders with Roman ones. Each section of the book contains three chapters—a biography of a Greek, a biography of a Roman, and a chapter examining correspondences between the two.

All of the titles of these third-chapters in the section followed the same format: “The COMPARISON of [Greek] with [Roman]” – with “COMPARISON” in all-caps. For example, “THE COMPARISON OF Alcibiades with Martius Coriolanus.”

Moreover, Jonson, with his specific description of “insolent Greece or haughty Rome.” even appears to be hinting at the parallels between Alcibiades and Coriolanus as they are the lead characters of two parallel tragedies—Timon of Athens and Coriolanus—in the very Folio he is introducing. As shown in the following passages, according to North’s translation, the Greek Alcibiades, one of the main characters of Timon of Athens, was known for his “insolence,” while the Roman Coriolanus was known as “haughty.”

Howbeit in Alcibiades there was nothing, but his insolency and vainglory that men misliked.20

This Timon was a citizen of ATHENS, that lived about the war of PELOPONNESUS, as appeareth by Plato, and Aristophanes comedies: in the which they mocked him, calling him a viper, & malicious man unto mankind, to shun all other men’s companies, but the company of young Alcibiades, a bold and insolent youth, whom he would greatly feast.

This latter passage, referring to Timon’s great feasts and his relationship with Alcibiades, describes the main focus of Timon of Athens and again describes Alcibiades as an insolent Greek. And this is how he is portrayed in Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Meanwhile, while the Greek warrior was known for his insolence, his Roman counterpart was a paragon of haughtiness. North’s translation of the story of Coriolanus emphasizes “the austerity of his nature, and his haughty obstinate mind.” More, all editions of the Roman tragedy mention his pride, condescension, and aloofness, with many editors describing Coriolanus as “haughty.” In fact, examples are so numerous that specific citations are pointless. A Google Book search for the phrase, “haughty Coriolanus,” yields more than 150 results. And it’s likely that the vast majority of all editions of the Roman tragedy describe him thusly.

Jonson’s remark in the front of a Folio that contains four tragedies based on Thomas North’s “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans COMPARED” including two parallel plays that invite comparisons between the “insolent” Greek Alcibiades and the “haughty” Roman Coriolanus is not a coincidence. Rather, Jonson is not only exposing the author behind the Folio but emphasizing the intricate entanglement among North’s plays and his translations.

I found the evidence for North’s authorship to be entirely convincing even before this. The textual similarities indicated by the plagiarism analysis is simply too strong to deny. Nor do I find it remotely troubling to accept that this means that the sonnets were written by someone else; they never struck me as having been authored by the same individual and I wondered about that even back in high school.

But this evidence from the First Folio would, in itself, be sufficient. And it’s truly amazing that no one else ever clocked it.

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